This week it was Silicon Valley versus the entire transportation sector. Scrappy startups and tech behemoths battled entrenched industries and government regulators throughout the globe, in what has become a fascinating illustration of how an entire social sector responds to
A team of researchers have developed a hacker-resistant device that could bring online voting to America. A prototype pin-pad device the size of a credit card, DuVote, reportedly allows citizens to securely vote in elections, even if their computer is completely controlled by nefarious hackers.
Regular Airbnb hosts are able to make enough profit to afford San Francisco’s skyrocketing cost of living, according to a new report from city officials [PDF]. The average host is making $440 profit per month (after rent), and some neighborhoods are snagging upwards of $1,900 a month.
I spent the last week gliding around San Francisco in the now infamous “suitsy,” an adult-sized pajama onesie disguised as a full business suit. At bars and in meetings, no one seemed to notice anything amiss. But, perhaps, I thought, this was because San Francisco is the home of weird attire, and my colleagues were just unfazed.
A new study finds that a brief walk around the office can offset the mortality risk of sitting or standing for extended periods of time.
As the average college debt soars past $30,000, a new report from Georgetown University details just how much money students give up by choosing sociology over calculus.
A team of cognitive psychologists have discovered a clever way to improve performance on challenging tasks: give people their maximum reward up front and deduct from it with each mistake. That is, when we presume people will live up to our best expectations, punishment ends up being a better strategy than reward.
Mark Zuckerberg joined other tech celebrities in a massive $100M funding round for a new education startup, AltSchool, which aims to disrupt America’s approach to elementary and middle-school education.
Uber is systematically wiping out taxis in San Francisco. As of last year, average taxi trips per month had reportedly plummeted 65 percent in just 2 years. In an effort to save the industry, a new startup, FlyWheel, has begun outfitting taxis with the Uber-like convenience of smartphone hailing and payments.
Medical researchers have discovered a surprisingly effective way to dramatically increase healthy lunch choices: label foods with emoticons and give out a small toy. The results of a school pilot study found that meals labeled with a “green smiley face” and paired with a toy spiked vegetable selection 62% and decreased chocolate milk selection 42%.
Over the past 3 years, there have been extraordinary advances in wearables for fitness: precise heart rate monitoring, form tracking, and energy output. The Apple Watch has none of these features.
Google unveiled an ambitious new plan to take on wireless carriers, with the launch of its own calling and data service, Project Fi. Americans are demanding a faster mobile experience, and Google CEO Larry Page is reportedly frustrated that AT&T and Verizon just have not been interested in building better infrastructure. So he launched his own wireless service — with a twist.
A fascinating new simulation finds that self-driving cars will terraform cities: 90 percent of cars will be eliminated, acres of land will open up, and commute times will drop 10 percent.
Google’s entire multi-billion dollar software utopia is designed to find the perfect search result. Back in 2005, before American and European Union government regulators painted Google as a monopoly, now-chairman Eric Schmidt was quite open about the search giant’s endgame.
America has the technology to make Tax Day simple. The IRS already collects financial information on what citizens earn throughout the year and can precisely estimate how much they owe automatically. All the IRS needs to do is send citizens the estimate, have them add in any optional deductions, and file it away with the click of a button.
There is a nagging suspicion that Hillary Clinton’s campaign suffers from narcissism. It’s the kind of suspicion that is hard to prove, but is nonetheless palpable every time the campaign releases a video.
Taxi unions are not the only government protected industry that ride-sharing companies are overhauling. Auto dealerships are indirectly feeling the heat, as American teens skip getting their driver’s license. Once an established past-time in American culture, in the last 30 years, the number of 16-year-olds with driver’s licenses has plummeted 40%, according to a 2012 article published in the journal of Traffic Injury Prevention.
Electronics are wreaking havoc on our sleep; late night reading on smartphones and tablets bombards our eyes with artificial light, tricking our brains into being alert right before we attempt to fall asleep. A recent experimental study from Harvard Medical
Tech workers do have a libertarian streak. Twelve times more tech workers would vote for Paul (12 percent) than Jeb Bush (one percent). But, I must stress, the results are within the margin of error.
Techies in Silicon Valley often tell me that if they do their job right, it should cease to exist. The goal of a lot of technology is to reduce the amount of human labor necessary to get something done. A new study finds that this Silicon Valley maxim also holds true for the government — in a massive way.
Paypal billionaire and Republican party unicorn Peter Thiel took the stage in Washington, D.C., to argue that America is not a democracy. “Calling our society a democracy is very misleading,” said Thiel at George Mason University. “We’re not a republic; we’re not a constitutional republic. We live in a state that’s dominated by these technocratic agencies.”
The battle for the next great social network service has become a neck-and-neck race. The hot new trend–as of this month –is live social video streaming, where users interact in real-time with their favorite Twitter friends, as they record events and conversation. One of the two contenders, Periscope, had the massive promotional power of Twitter itself, but after a brief rise to dominance, has fallen into tight competition with the scrappy startup, Meerkat.
Despite lingering gloom from the economic recession, life is getting much better for the most distressed people all over the world.
Wealthy tech founders and the automation of middle-class jobs are often blamed for increasing concentrations of wealth in fewer hands. But a 26-year-old MIT graduate student, Matthew Rognlie, is making waves for an alternative theory of inequality: the problem is housing.
The U.S. Senate’s most outspoken contrarian, Ted Cruz, became the first official 2016 candidate to launch a bid for the White House Monday. Despite the fact that he’s highly controversial within his own party, it has long been known that
Facebook is reportedly in talks with dozens of the world’s biggest media empires, including the New York Times and Buzzfeed, to host news content directly on the social networking site.
At the TED conference in Vancouver this year, one of the main designers of the iPod and co-founder of Nest Labs, Tony Fadell, gave a few simple tips about creating awesome products. While most of us won’t be working on the next worldwide gadget phenomenon, his tips, especially those from the late, great Steve Jobs, seemed delightfully practical for all sorts of projects.
Electronics are wreaking havoc on the human sleep cycle. iPhones, iPads, laptops, and electronic lights bombard our eyes with artificial light, tricking our brains into believing we should stay awake long after the sun sets. Indeed, one recent study found that people have much worse deep sleep if they read a tablet or phone before bed.
We’ve known for years that most Americans support the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance apparatus. Poll after poll shows that about roughly 53 percent of Americans think the government should prioritize investigating terrorism over privacy.
For decades, top colleges got by on reputation alone, because there wasn’t good data on how their graduates actually fared in the job market. Many just assumed Harvard graduates were the top contenders, because the Ivy League school was so selective.
In just a few years, a handful of Silicon Valley ridesharing companies have created a new market that’s worth multiple times the entire U.S. Taxi industry.
As the bank accounts of Silicon Valley swell, so too does their appetite for lobbying the government. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, over the last 25 years, lobbying has spiked almost 2,000%, from 800K in 1990 to over 60M in 2012.
Apple unveiled its highly anticipated health-tracking Watch today, along with a breakthrough initiative to vastly increase the research resources of the global medical community. With a new app, ResearchKit, millions of Apple users can now offer crucial data on their daily habits to approved medical researchers.
If history is any indication, we could be finally reading Hillary Clinton’s secretive personal emails sometime after the 2016 election. The law responsible for permitting the public to demand access to undisclosed information, the Freedom of Information Act, is a notorious bureaucratic snail.
Some of us dream about what the future will be like. Others have billions of dollars at their disposal to make it a reality. When one of these few ultra-rich technology folks opines about the future, my ears perk up.
Forbes released it’s annual list of the world’s billionaires and it shows that America is increasingly becoming a nation of self-made elite. Since Forbes started keeping track in 1984, the number of completely self-made billionaires (who grew from little wealth)
Netflix usually takes up about 30% of all Internet bandwidth in the U.S. Yes, a single Internet company is responsible for nearly a 1/3rd of all the Internet’s resources. So, the total resources available to all Internet users is heavily dependent on Netflix, alone.
